oil

The Pipeline is the Punchline

10 inches wide x 8 inches high, across two pages of a notebook

collage

I spent the last week in Alaska. Three days were spent in a Chautauqua workshop on Oil in Alaska; two of those days were in the BP conference room listening to many lectures on the production of oil on the North Slope. Then the last day, we went to Prudhoe Bay up on the Arctic Ocean to see how BP gets oil out of the ground and sends it down the Alaska Oil Pipeline. There will be much more about this in subsequent posts—stay tuned.

Today's post is really in response to Illustration Friday's theme, punchline, put up last Friday. I created this piece out of images from various brochures and other publications that I saw while in Alaska. As good as BP might be about their safety and environmental concerns, their bottom line is still, indeed, the production of oil and soon, if all goes as they plan, natural gas. And the pipeline(s) that move the stuff are the end of the North Slope story. This is where the fuel goes to get to the Lower 48 where we use it all up. And of all the oil that we use here, 20 per cent of it is produced by BP from the North Slope of Alaska, up on the Arctic Ocean, pulling the stuff from underground reserves that were laid down millions of years ago. It is a long, long story.